INTERTRIBAL WARFARE

Intertribal warfare was intense throughout the
Great Plains during the 1700s and 1800s, and
archeological data indicate that warfare was
present prior to this time. Human skeletons
from as early as the Woodland Period (250 B.C.
to A.D. 900) show occasional marks of violence,
but conflict intensified during and after
the thirteenth century, by which time farmers
were well established in the Plains. After 1250,
villages were often destroyed by fire, and human
skeletons regularly show marks of violence,
scalping, and other mutilations. Warfare
was most intense along the Missouri River
in the present-day Dakotas, where ancestors
of the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras were
at war with each other, and towns inhabited
by as many as 1,000 people were often fortified
with ditch and palisade defenses. Excavations
at the Crow Creek site, an ancestral Arikara
town dated to 1325, revealed the bodies of 486
people–men, women, and children, essentially
the town's entire population–in a mass
grave. These individuals had been scalped and
dismembered, and their bones showed clear
evidence of severe malnutrition, suggesting
that violence resulted from competition for
food, probably due to local overpopulation
and climatic deterioration. Violence among
farmers continued from the 1500s through the
late 1800s.

Archeological data on war among the nomadic
Plains hunters are few, but some nomads
were attacking farmers on the edges of
the Plains by at least the 1500s. By the eighteenth
century, war was common among the
nomads, apparently largely because of conflicts
over hunting territories.

Prior to the introduction of European horses
and guns, Plains warfare took two forms. When
equally matched forces confronted each other,
warriors sheltered behind large shields, firing
arrows; individual warriors came out from behind
these lines to dance and taunt their opponents.
This mode of combat was largely for
show and casualties were light. However, sometimes,
large war parties surprised and utterly
destroyed small camps or hamlets. Increasing
interaction with Europeans from the eighteenth
century on changed these patterns dramatically.
Massed shield lines could neither stand against
mounted warriors nor protect against firearms;
this mode of battle largely disappeared with
the introduction of horses and guns, although
equally matched mounted war parties sometimes
used the old tactics. Early access to horses
also allowed some groups, notably the Comanches,
to overwhelm and displace neighboring
tribes who lacked such access. Documentary
and archeological evidence indicate that horses
and guns contributed mightily to this more destructive
mode of Plains warfare, most intensively
along the Missouri River.

Raids for horses by small groups of warriors
became a primary form of conflict after
about 1750, particularly among the nomadic
groups. Horse raiders usually entered enemy
camps at night to take horses picketed close
to their owners. Such raids were dangerous–raiders
were killed when caught in the act–and
successful raiders often achieved high status.
The relation between war and status in the
Plains is similarly evident in the practice of
counting coup, in which a living enemy (or
sometimes a dead enemy) was touched with
the hand or a special stick. This act signified
ultimate bravery in most Plains tribes and
gave a warrior great prestige.

The prestige attached to stealing horses and
to counting coup rather than killing has contributed
to the view that Plains warfare was a
moderately dangerous kind of game driven by
individual quests for status rather than "real"
war driven by competition for resources. This
is misleading. Individual warriors sought status
and sometimes avoided killing enemies in
battle, but destructive high-casualty warfare
was widespread, with documented battles involving
thousands of warriors and hundreds
of fatalities. Other massacres like that at Crow
Creek are known from the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, and archeological and
documentary evidence show great changes in
tribal territories resulting from war before
and after white contact.

Destructive war in the Plains intensified after
contact because of migrations of eastern
tribes (the Cheyennes and Lakotas, for example)
into the Plains as settlement moved west,
because Europeans and Americans manipulated
traditional hostilities, and because tribes
competed for access to European and American
trade, especially in fur-rich areas of the
Northern Plains and Prairie Provinces. Contact-period
war ended some long-standing
hostilities: for example, the Mandans, Hidatsas,
and Arikaras, decimated by disease and
raiding, banded together for mutual protection
during the 1860s. Other hostilities continued,
and expanding European Americans
exploited them: for example, Crows and Pawnees
scouted in military campaigns against the
Cheyennes and Lakotas. Intertribal violence
in the Plains subsided with the confinement of
the tribes to reservations in the late nineteenth
century.